I had a gig in a Pizza Express tonight. Surely for a
Pizza Lover like me, this would be my ultimate gig ever. Plus it would be a chance for Pizza Express to pay me back
for their recent too slow service.
I thought I was bound to go down well with a group of people who like Pizza Express as surely they will be the same as me.
I even have some Pizza Express based material which I started with. It went OK, and I was of course just ad libbing it, but it didn't receive the kind of standing ovation I would have expected from Pizza Lovers like me.
In the end the gig was OK, but a little uneven. I had one drunken heckler who when I told him he was supposed to be funnier than me replied that he wasn't getting paid. So I ended up giving him ten pounds to see if that helped. But it didn't. That's twenty pounds that I have blown for nothing in Pizza Express in the last month.
This particular restaurant has lots of jazz and events and on looking through the programme in the dressing room afterwards I saw that Leee John was going to be on later in the month. You know,
Leee John from off of "Imagination". Naturally I want to comedically refer to him as Leee Johns as I would usually do, but the additional "e" in his first name seems to confuse this usually brilliant joke. I also actually did think he was called Leee Johns, so in a way calling him Leee John would still be funny, if only I had been right.
I was slightly surprised that Leee has still persisted with the whole extra "e" Leee thing (maybe you feel the same about my John Majors schtick, but at least that isn't my own name). It might have seemed like a good idea when he was young back in the 1980s to spell his name in a "cool" and incorrect way. It was like something from the future and perhaps heralded in a new era where people would repeat the last letter of their first name in order to create new and more exciting names.
Doubtless it got him a bit more attention and to be honest I wouldn't have remembered his name otherwise. I always used to insist on calling him Leee, by which I mean I would always pronounce the extra e. I maybe would cheekily add a couple of extra ees into the mix to satirise him for his affectation.
And now Leee is older and wiser you'd think the Leee thing might be a bit embarrassing to him. You'd think he might want to quietly revert to the name Lee. Surely over 20 years of having to add the extra "e" must have become tiresome. A little bit?
I mean it would be fair enough if that's the name he was given at birth - maybe if say the vicar had been frightened by a mouse during the Christening or if the person typing the birth certificate had sneezed, but according to wikipedia he was born John Leslie McGregor, so the whole Leee thing was a deliberate decision and one that he has felt was worth sticking with.
I wish Leee luck and in a way I admire him for his insistence on clinging on to that extra "e" It is his gimmick and some people will remember him for that. But given that it didn't herald the new era of people calling themselves Simonn, Catherinee or Iann, it maybe looks a bit silly to be called Leee still. I would admire him more if he had steadfastly added another e to the end of his name every couple of years or so. If he was called Leeeeeeeeeeeeeee John or better still Leeeeeeeeeee Johns then I would truly respect him.
Though I am going to try calling myself Richardd for a bit now and see if that improves my fortunes any.
